Robinson & Brown

I do not believe that determining whether his methods were right or wrong is a useful exercise. I think that we have spent too much time focusing on the violence. The overall message is to continue to fight for something. I think that Thoreau’s emphasis on Brown’s decision to fight despite not getting any monetary reward for it and without it affecting him directly gets at where we would come in.

In trying to piece together the readings and figuring out what they mean to me, I realized that Brown and Robinson are similar. First, Robinson and Brown prepared or readied themselves to take action. It was not a hasty knee-jerk reaction. Robinson fought in the Vietnam War, went to law school, worked at the prosecutors office, SEC, and then became a private defense attorney. Similarly, Brown prepared himself by learning through experience. He got familiar with the military and war. And although he chose not to engage in it (unless for liberty) it was important for him to understand the costs, and not just the pecuniary costs, of “firing a single bullet.” He prepared himself in other ways—eating and living a certain way and recruiting specific people (among other things).

Second, both of these men tried to get in touch with, as Robinson puts it, the thang, or as Thoreau writes living a life of exposure.

With respect to us, I think that the point to take here is that we have options. We can sit and be naïve—let the world continue and only get up when everyone else has—or we can do something about what we see is unjust. The “what” we do is very particular to who we are and what we can do as individuals. We would need to make informed choices that make sure that our steps help us to develop and mature as attorneys. The problem is that too many of us are way too far from “the thang” and live a life not fully exposed and as a result have a harder time seeing injustices.

It is much easier to sit back and judge than to do something. I think Wylie put it best when he said that he said he was cynical but not a cynic. I think that we are critics but not critical. We can point to methods we think are right or wrong without looking at the message or at least offering an alternative. Instead we are content with the contribution of criticism instead of actually trying to wrestle with the concepts that make us uneasy.

In our discussion of Brown we focused too much on the violence used instead of talking about the importance of taking action and dealing with resistance or the non-action of others. I think that focusing on when to stop does not make sense when (for the most part) we have not started. Thus I would not ask what but I’d ask would you (try to) do something if today 20 million+ people were slaves?

-- LissetteDuran - 01 Mar 2012

I wish I saw this before writing my last post in DecidingInThePresent 2 minutes ago but I just wanted to say that I love the distinction you made in the last sentence between "would you" and "what would you" - sums up really well what Eben wants us to focus on and what a bunch of people, myself included have been focusing on, at least until today. I totally agree with you that the "would you" is much more important right now than "what would you" and I totally get why Eben wants us to focus on the former and not the latter, at least at this point. I feel, and maybe other people would agree, that it seemed in class like Eben was completely disregarding, and perhaps even disparaging, the second question. If I may criticize Eben for a moment (oh what the hell, all my chips are on the table already as it is), I think it might have been more productive to acknowledge that "what would you do" is a legitimate and difficult question (which I still think it's reasonable to say) but that it's not the question we should be focusing on at the moment and that we should put it aside until we've sufficiently answered the "would you" question for ourselves. I think that would have allowed people, including myself, to more easily shift our focus back to the real issue. Just my 2 cents and again, I loved your post!

-- JosephItkis - 02 Mar 2012